About the program

PeepLTP is an adult learning program that aims to support parents to develop sensitive and responsive relationships with their babies and young children and improve the home learning environment. 

Program structure

PeepLTP is made up 5 strands of learning and development: 

1. Personal, social and emotional development (PSED)
2. Communication and language (CL)
3. Early literacy (EL)
4. Early maths (EM)
5. Health and physical development (HPD).

Each strand (except one) has 15 child development topics (74 in total) and will be relevant to one or more of the following developmental stages: babies, toddlers or pre-schoolers (and/or slightly older children, as appropriate). 

Topics are selected by practitioners (and parents) to build courses based on criteria such as interests of families, budget, time constraints, service needs and so on. Each session is based on a child development topic, which contains: 

• talk time, to discuss key ideas with parents and carers relating to the topic focus
• songs and rhymes
• books and stories
• ways to put ORIM into action (Opportunities, Recognition, Interaction, Modelling)
• play activities (during the session and/or ideas to try at home).
• handouts.

Practitioners can decide the length and format of their Peep sessions and courses. There are various iterations of the program, but the program materials indicate that on average sessions last about 1 hour (generally shorter if online or 1-to-1). 

Evaluation and effectiveness

Several evaluations of the program have been undertaken with mixed results. Older evaluations of the program that used a quasi-experimental design showed positive program outcomes, while the more recent and much larger randomised controlled trial (RCT) found no significant differences between intervention and control groups on literacy and social/emotional outcomes for children.

The most recent study was a RCT of a bespoke 20-week version of the PEEP program for three-year old children in Nursery settings, known as the Learning Together Study (PEEP-LTS). This was a large-scale study and involved 1447 families from 139 settings across England (Miller et al., 2020).

The authors of this study found no evidence that children in the intervention group had better language skills, communication skills or social emotional development than the children in the control group by the end of the study. However, a small improvement—two months’ additional progress—in early literacy skills was observed for children who took part in PeepLTP compared to those who did not. There was also a small observed improvement in the home learning environment for parents who participated in PeepLTP compared to those who did not – although this finding was not statistically significant.

The Birth to School Study (1998-2005) involved 600 UK families across one intervention and one control group over a period of 6 years (Evangelou et al., 2005). The findings of that study suggested that children who attended PEEP groups made better progress on outcomes related to early literacy development than children who did not attend, and that they had higher self-esteem.

Similarly, a quasi-experimental study of the Foundation PEEP program (3- & 4-year-old children) found that children attending the PEEP program made significantly more progress than the comparison group children in verbal comprehension, vocabulary, concepts about print, numeracy, and cognitive and physical competence over the course of 2 years (Evangelou & Sylva, 2007). 

References

Evangelou, M., Brooks, G., Smith, S., & Jennings, D. (2005). Birth to school study: A longitudinal evaluation of the Peers Early Educational Partnership (PEEP) 1998-2005. Nottingham Department for Education and Skills: .

Evangelou, M., & Sylva, K. (2007). Evidence on effective early childhood interventions from the United Kingdom: An evaluation of the peers early education partnership (PEEP). Early Childhood Research & Practice,1(9).

Miller, S., Dunne, L., & Laishley, A. (2020). Peep learning together programme: Evaluation Report. Millbank: Education Endowment Foundation: .